When I look over the notes I’ve taken on creative practice, in the private spaces of my sketchbooks and on class pages I write for my students, the one word that shows up more than any other is idea. It makes sense, as the notion of “having an idea” comes up frequently in creative practice. We often look for the ideas, both as a way to make meaning of our own creative urges, and to understand what drives the works of others. The real reason, however, that I think I write about this so much, is that ideas are my love language. What follows is a pulling together of the many love letters I’ve written for the love of an idea.
Where do ideas come from? Who has access to them? These are questions that are as old as humanity itself, infused with beliefs about God, the cosmos, and human consciousness. Do we catch ideas, hear them, channel them, from whom and from where? Do ideas come to us when we are quiet enough, smart enough, when we meditate, pray, beg, want them bad enough, when we are clear or when we are in an altered state, when we are joyful or when we are destitute?
There are so many ways we come into contact with ideas: by making, reading, taking in art in its diversity of forms, by moving our bodies, taking a shower, taking a walk, petting the dog, helping a friend, being quiet, being loud, thinking, and letting our minds wander. There is no scarcity of contact. The practice is in learning to listen. Ideas often arrive quietly, unnoticed, making contact with us as we distractedly scan the horizon for a sign, looking for someone or something to deliver undeniable proof of that which is already shifting the subtle equilibrium of our bodies.
How do we learn to listen? I start by asking: what do ideas feel like in the body? Take a moment now to notice the presence of ideas in your body. Ask yourself a question and notice what yes feels like, what no feels like, and if you can give yourself the time and space for maybe. Where do you feel this and what does it feel like? Imagine a meal you are going to make: how does that idea take shape in you? Notice your senses stirring, your body thinking and responding. Becoming aware of ideas in the body can help to alleviate the indecision we may feel about a project or a path. There is information available to us when we listen.
Tuning in to the physical impact of ideas in the body — the quickening breath and pulse, the sudden need to shimmy, jump, or clap — challenges the notion of an abstract concept. Just as abstract art can be a direct line into sensation, an abstract concept, born of a physical body and shaped by that body’s interaction with the physical word, can lead us back to sensation as our primary guide. Speak the words justice or freedom and notice what part of your body blooms. In this way, there is no idea that cannot be felt with our senses.
Ideas exist in their own time. What we often think of as a beginning is really a hand dipped into a flowing stream. We name that moment beginning as a way to orient ourselves in a process that will always flow beyond our ability to perceive it in its entirety. When we press our ideas to respond to our timekeeping, demanding that they arrive when we want them, ready to do our bidding and solve our problems, ideas may respond. But their response will be limited to the ways in which they are asked. Letting ourselves be carried by the flow of ideas can rewild the time we try to keep and keep us moving in a constant state of discovery.
Ideas are an invitation to experience oneself at the border of the known and the unknown, to recognize that knowing is never a thing we have but a process of continuous change we bear witness to. To be called into that uncertainty is to be made humble by the inevitability of our own unmaking. Being with ideas is a practice of allowing oneself to know nothing, to throw all the tools, materials, thoughts and desires into the void to be remade in a process we can work with but can not control.
Sharing an idea blurs the boundaries of body and identity. An idea I felt stirring in the soft tissues of my body now carried in the mouth of another collapses physical distance and difference. That mouth speaks it into being and the idea shimmers through my shivering nervous system. The naked sharing of ideas is an erotic practice of giving and receiving, merging and emerging.
Sharing an idea is my wild unknowabilty touching the wild unknowabilty of another. It is not an intimacy that comes from gathering all the threads together, what we know or think we know about them or us. It is an intimacy that comes from letting the threads go and welcoming in the diffuse, unarticulated space vibrating in their absence. When we come together in the unknowing of a shared idea, we look into darkness and catch, in each other, a glimpse of the Divine.
Sharing ideas spools and entangles the threads of kinship. The Ancient Greek usage of the word “idea” suggested a set of shared, observable traits. Ideas existed in groupings, families, relations. Latin relationem: a bringing back, restoring. We restore our ancestry, gain siblings, and birth new kin through sharing ideas.
Ideas are a relationship between ourselves and the world. They are the collaborative bridge that acknowledges the aliveness of everything around us. A tree, a rock, a machine, a plastic cup — they are not inertly inspiring our ideas but are participating, co-creating them with us. Ideas are a practice of loving the world. They are not a thing we have. And they are not ours to keep.
The Drawing on the Senses exercises, posted every Monday, are on the Drawing on the Senses page.